Anti-utopia and the murder of five Kurdish women

“We” by Yevgeny Zamyatin, for example, had a deep and long-lasting influence on me when I read it many years ago as a young university student who described himself then as a socialist.

In “We,” Zamyatin describes a totalitarian world using dark humor and satire. He wrote this book in 1921, three years after the Russian Revolution. Zamyatin was once a feverish supporter of the Socialist Revolution, however, as a literary genius he understood what kind of society this so called revolution had promised.

His novel is set in the future, in which people are given numbers, instead of names and live in glass houses that are monitored by the state 24 hours a day. His work was quite an inspiration for many others. George Orwell and other contemporary novelists followed in his food steps.

In “We,” D-503 starts to have dreams that are in sharp contradiction to the “ideal world” in which he is living. In his world, everything is ruled by “reason” and there is no room for human emotion. Later on, I-330, a woman, takes him to the outside world through a secret tunnel; there they meet other human beings different from themselves.Later on, their secret is revealed and they are both punished by the state. D-503’s memory is erased completely and I-330 is killed after being tortured. D-503 watches her torture with equanimity.

I just remembered Zamyatin’s novel when I read the story of the five women militants who were killed last year. Their story is hair-raising and astonishing.

On Sept. 18, 2011, the Fırat news agency, which is close to the PKK, announced that five women guerillas lost their lives last year in a cave in which they were stationed due to winter conditions. According to the news agency’s report, the women militants were killed as a result of gas poisoning. While they were sleeping there was a leak from a generator nearby and they inhaled the gas.

The PKK explained to Fırat the reason behind the time gap between the incident and the reporting of it citing the limiting conditions the forces were faced with. Due to these conditions, an investigation into the incident took a year to complete. This was why the PKK only announced the death of the five guerillas a year later.

After the news was circulated by the agency, tents were set up in Diyarbakır, Mersin and other cities for people who wished to offer their condolences. These tents were even visited by Kurdish deputies.

However, on Sept. 20, the Sabah daily published a completely different story. According to Sabah, a girl using the code name of Jiyan who deserted the PKK contacted the families of these five girls and told them that their daughters had actually been killed by the PKK. According to Jiyan, Hazine (32), Miyaser (26), Leyla (26), Leyla (17) and Şilan (18) had decided to flee from a PKK camp located in a mountainous area in Diyarbakır. While they were trying to escape other PKK militants caught them. They were imprisoned in a cave and tortured. Their “trial” by the PKK ended with death sentences and they were all executed. This is a piece of news by a Turkish newspaper. As far as I understood the PKK has not made any announcement denying Sabah’s news story. We know there are many other stories of the execution of militants inside the PKK. We unfortunately do not have any Kurdish Zamyatins to tell us the story of these people who were killed by their own organization. A Zamyatin who illustrates the story, how “freedom fighters” are turned into machines that follow orders blindly; how an organization turns into a totalitarian structure in which the lives of human beings have no value whatsoever.

It is really sad not having good storytellers when there are so many stories waiting to be told with the language of literature and art. Who knows, maybe one day we will have such courageous people to tell us the story of the Kurds, who have deeply suffered from the brutality of the state and the PKK, which has created a devastatingly painful dystopia for them.